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rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath.

The US exercises broad jurisdiction because they say that anything with just 10% US origin content by value is subject to export controls.

So what that means in practice is that pretty much for anything an organization might want to bring into the country,

they need to apply for a US export license.

The solution to that would be to take an approach similar to what the Treasury Department has done and pre-authorize certain specific categories of items that are identified in advance as critical to humanitarian response in a time of crisis.

It's something kind of worth focusing on. There are a number of steps that would be necessary in order for the Commerce Department to do that, but definitely an area of need and something that should be addressed moving forward if we really want to continue to facilitate the ability of aid organizations to deliver humanitarian assistance.

I'm Scott Arnerson and this is the LawFair podcast for March 14, 2023.

For years, the international community has wrestled with how to reconcile sanctions policies targeting terrorist groups and other malevolent actors with the need to provide humanitarian assistance in areas under those groups control.

Late last year, both the Biden administration and the UN Security Council took major steps towards a new approach on this issue, installing broad carveouts for humanitarian assistance into existing sanctions regimes.

To talk through these changes, I sat down with two leading sanctions experts, Rachel Albert, a partner at the LawFirm, Jeter and Block, and former State Department Attorney, and Alex Serden, the founder and principal of Capital Peak Strategies and a former Treasury Department official, including at the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.

We talked about the longstanding issues surrounding humanitarian assistance, what these changes may mean in jurisdictions like Afghanistan, and where more changes may yet be forthcoming.

It's the LawFair podcast for March 14, a new sanctions approach for humanitarian assistance.

So, Alex, before we dig into this most recent set of events, I want you to kind of set the stage for us a little bit.

What we're talking about today really is this inherent conundrum or policy tension that's been latent in US and international sanctions policy for a really long time around the need to sink into the United States.

Around the need to sanction bad actors who we understand to be bad actors, and then the risk that those sanctions will make other very important good things more difficult to happen, in this case, particularly humanitarian assistance.

Tell us a little bit about that tension and where it comes from in sanctions policy, and the role it's kind of come to play a wise become this problem that we saw the United Nations Treasury Department feel the need to address in this action we're discussing.

This does go to some of the core issues that you address is that the purpose of sanctions is to prohibit or exclude individuals entities and countries from the benefits of the global financial system.

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